The chat company missed analysts’ expectations on revenue ($181.7 million vs. $186.2 million expected), earnings (it lost 16 cents per share, which was more than the 14 cents expected) and, most troublingly for its future, daily active users (it clocked 173 million vs. 175.2 million expected). Snap shares went off a cliff on the news, falling 16%, almost down to half of its $17 IPO price.

Getting “copied and crushed”

In an interview with Yahoo Finance in June, Ted Livingston, CEO of the messaging app Kik, commented that young tech startups, even those with some fresh new innovation to offer, are currently more at risk of getting killed off by Big Tech (think Facebook, Google, Apple [AAPL] and Amazon [AMZN]) than ever before. These giants, with massive built-in user bases, can easily ape the popular products of smaller players and scale them faster. Livingston called it getting “copied and crushed.”

It’s a perfect phrase for what has already happened to Snapchat, and what can easily continue to happen.

Snapchat got copied and crushed when Facebook-owned Instagram added Instagram Stories in August 2016, an obvious ripoff of Snapchat Stories, which lets users share photos or videos that last 24 hours on their profiles. By April of this year, less than eight months later, Instagram Stories surpassed Snapchat with 250 million daily active users. Facebook soon added Stories to Messenger, WhatsApp, and at last the Facebook app, too.

Stories isn’t the only way Facebook has copied Snapchat. Facebook added a new camera to Messenger that looks just like the Snap camera. Facebook also added mid-story video ads to Instagram that show up the same way Snapchat ads appear to users.

Snapchat logo is seen through broken glass in this illustration picture, May 11, 2017. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

Some analysts think Facebook isn’t even the problem, but Snap itself.

“I think 100 percent of the problems that we’re seeing at Snapchat are self-inflicted,” James Cakmak of Monness, Crespi, Hardt and Co., told Bloomberg TV. “They’re not doubling down on the core areas of expertise that we thought that they could capitalize on, like the content side of the picture, and they’re not really educating the existing users, as well as new potential users, on the new product iterations.”

You could take a small dose of financial optimism from two metrics in Snap’s earnings: revenue, while it fell short of expectations, was up more than 150% from a year ago; and, as Jackdaw Research analyst Jan Dawson points out, Snap’s ARPU (annual revenue per user) is growing nicely outside the US.

There are a few specific products that Snap believers might point to as bright spots, but any of these could get copied by a larger giant, and many already are.